


Mercy

by aban_asaara



Series: Shadows at Noontide [5]
Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-18
Updated: 2017-07-18
Packaged: 2018-12-03 19:52:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11539281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aban_asaara/pseuds/aban_asaara
Summary: In another life she would have laughed as she said it, but she can barely work up the strength to speak the words, much less laugh at them. She may never laugh again.Hawke and Anders have one last conversation after the Chantry explosion and the battle at the Gallows.





	Mercy

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings for one brief mention of self-harm related to blood magic, overall bleakness, and unrequited Anders.

_He wants to die. Kill him and be done with it._ For a moment, she thinks Fenris will do it himself. While Sebastian is hurling words at her, his pleasant Starkhaven brogue now anything but, Fenris reaches for the hilt of his sword, and she thinks he will do it. But no—instead he steps in front of Sebastian and stares him down, and their friendship snaps between them like one of the prince’s bowstrings.

If not for her, they would still be friends. Fenris could have gone to Starkhaven, and she would have been the one to follow for once. But she ruined even that for him.

(One day, she will ask him why he didn’t kill Anders, and he will answer thus: “Killing Danarius and Hadriana did not undo what they’ve done, yet I would have killed Varania had you not showed her mercy. I—couldn’t kill the mage. Not after you spared him.”)

What else was she to do, though? Murder her friend in cold blood—the man she could have loved had she only let it happen, the healer who brought her back from the Void after the Arishok ran her through with a sword a handspan wide—like he was just another slaver, another bandit preying on refugees?

Yet they all looked at her as if it was up to her, as if the tears and blood she shed and _spilled_ in the name of this blasted city were ever without reason—and Andraste help her, of _course_ this is more than reason enough—but she wouldn’t be alive were it not for Anders, and as short-sighted and self-centered and _stupid_ as it was, it was the only thing that made sense when nothing else did.

Her mercy will haunt her for the rest of her days, though: the realisation surfaces in the bluster of the Waking Sea, where she’d rather let her gaze drown than look at Anders again.

“So … this is it?” The wind blows his voice towards her after riffling through blond hair and the feathers on his coat, yet it’s almost lost in the roar of the sea and the grinding noise of the slave statues still ringing in her ears. “You’re staying?”

 _With him?_ hangs unspoken in the air, in the glance he throws somewhere over her shoulder, where she knows Fenris is waiting, ready to tear through the distance between them. “Don’t try anything, mage,” the elf warned in an undertone, too battleworn to muster much heat behind the words, when Anders pulled her aside.

Hawke nods, once. Anders’s knuckles turn white around the ironbark grip of his stave. “How can you stay with someone who loathes everything that makes you _you_?” he retorts.

“Fenris has yet to lie to me and drag me down into the sewers to pick up crystallised body waste.”

In another life she would have laughed as she said it, but she can barely work up the strength to speak the words, much less laugh at them. She may never laugh again.

Anders flinches. “Trust me when I say that I did it for you. I only lied to protect you, and the rest … it needed to be done, for the sake of all mages. But you heard him, Hawke: he thinks you made a mistake protecting them,” he says, sweeping an arm in the direction of the Gallows, “whereas _he_ would’ve slaughtered them all like cattle. Mages like me and _you_. And you think he _loves_ you? It will gnaw at him until one day he lashes out at you, and when he does, it won’t be pretty.”

Perhaps she should deny it, defend Fenris, but she’s tired, Maker she’s so tired, and she doesn’t have it in her anymore. “Maybe.”

“Hawke, it’s not too late. Come with me,” Anders says, his fingers closing around her arm. “I can make it all up to you, I swear. I’ve held back from saying it, but I l—”

“Anders, _don’t_.” It rips out of her, halfway between a gasp and a sob. She spared him her blade, but these two words may have killed him just as well. On his lips, the faded memory of a kiss, a mistake, a plea she can’t answer. In his eyes, the certainty that she failed him as she did everyone else, lost him to Justice, that if she had loved him, this instant would have killed her too.

His hand lets go of her, drops back to his side. The lines on his pale face are starker than she remembers. “Then for your sake, I hope I’m wrong.”

The last thing she recalls before stumbling into the rowboat that takes them back to Kirkwall proper is the snap of his coat as he whirls around. The glint of a golden earring. The spark in Varric’s eyes, gone. Isabela quiet for once, twirling a knife between her fingers. Merrill nursing the cuts on her wrists. Donnic and Aveline embracing before the loom of the Gallows, the stone at their feet splotched red with Meredith’s shadow.

She recalls the hand that steadies her, slender and steeled and silver-streaked, and for half a heartbeat, the flicker of a thought, the wisp of a dream lost upon waking, that if she is to die by that hand, then so be it.


End file.
